Imagine, if you will, looking at your neighbour upgrading their house from a mud hut to a more modern construction and marvelling at the wonderful qualities of asbestos as an insulator.That's how I feel watching people at voteformmp.ca promoting the change of Ontario's electoral method from the existing First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system to Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP).Yes, FPTP sucks. And yes, MMP improves on it in certain ways. That's not the question. The question is what would the best electoral system be. Asbestos is better than mud. That doesn't mean I'm going to install it in my home.Asbestos causes cancer when inhaled. The cancer of MMP is party politics. Party politics is ruining what might otherwise be an admirable democracy in our country. Members of legislative bodies are not accountable to their constituents, or to their voters, they are accountable to their parties.Follow the links of power: who decides, and where does the money come from?A person decides they want to be elected because they want to do good. They have to pick a party, because unknown independents don't get elected. Who decides whether or not they get to run for that party? First, the local riding association, which is often less than 12 people, and second, the party and its leader. The person needs money and help running their campaign. They earn something like $1.75 for every vote they get, but that money goes to... the Party. Where does the help come from? The party. They need votes to get elected. What determines how people vote? More than anything else, the party leader. Once elected they want responsibility on committees and as ministers. Who dishes that out? The Party. They want to vote their conscience, but there is a whip telling them to do what the Party says. Who tells the whip what to say? The Party Leader. Who decides the Party Leader? The Party Members do, but often as a result of leadership campaigns that depend heavily on loans made by friends, and party insiders, and which are not subject to the kind of democratic standards that we would expect of a general election.So we have this entire system built up to make people dependent on political parties, and then we complain about how partisan our representatives are and how they don't represent their constituents.Some people wrongly assume that the problem is how power is divided among parties, and those people suggest using MMP, because MMP would divide power among parties in a way that is more representative of how people vote. But that's not the problem. The question is not which of the thieves gets what portion of your coinpurse.The problem is the division of power between voters and parties. Voters have nearly none. Parties have it all.And what will MMP do to the problem of the division of power between the voters and the parties?Some portion of the legislative body will be elected from a second set of ballots. On that set of ballots, who do voters get to choose between? Not who, but what. Parties. No independents allowed. Who decides who actually fills the seats that are won by the parties? The Parties themselves, of course.Who will those members be accountable to? They can't even claim to have had any impact on their own election at all. They owe it entirely to the party that selected them, and will have no allegiance to anything but the party as a result.MMP mis-diagnoses the problem with our political system as disproportionality, and proposes a solution that makes the real problem worse. Yes, the percentage of members from each party will more closely match the percentage of votes each of those parties got. But no one is going to care any more about what the voters want, think, or need. And a great many are going to care a great deal less.Besides, there are ways you can increase proportionality, and reduce party power at the same time. So why MMP?